Posts tagged with: health care

Back in 2009, I wrote a commentary titled “Veterans First on Health Care.” I argued the government must prove it can handle existing obligations before proposing any further takeover of the health care industry. I interviewed former Congressman Gene Taylor (D-Miss), who I once worked for, and among other things, assisted with Veterans Affairs claims and other military constituent services. Taylor made the point then that “We [government] can’t pay for the promises we’ve already made on health care, and it only gets worse for the next fifty years.”

I posed the logical question, “If it cannot handle the challenge of caring for 8 million veterans, how will a government bureaucracy manage a system dealing with 300 million Americans?”

Unfortunately, according to CNN, things have become even worse for American veterans who use VA hospitals:

Military veterans are dying needlessly because of long waits and delayed care at U.S. veterans hospitals, a CNN investigation has found.

What’s worse, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is aware of the problems and has done almost nothing to effectively prevent veterans dying from delays in care, according to documents obtained by CNN and interviews with numerous experts.

The problem has been especially dire at the Williams Jennings Bryan Dorn Veterans Medical Center in Columbia, South Carolina. There, veterans waiting months for simple gastrointestinal procedures — such as a colonoscopy or endoscopy — have been dying because their cancers aren’t caught in time.

The entire piece at CNN is worth reading. It’s a scary glimpse on a smaller scale of just how destructive single-payer health care is and how it leads to rationing of care and death.

We know that ObamaCare is causing this happen to people all across America — your family, your friends, your co-workers, your employees. Maybe even you.

Washington needs to see what is happening. That’s why Independent Women’s Voice launched a new Tumblr site — MyCancellation.com — and we are looking for submissions from the millions across the country who have received cancellation letters from their health insurance providers notifying them that their plan – that they liked – will be cancelled due to ObamaCare. (more…)

The Obama Administration is counting down the days and rounding up “navigators” to get Obamacare off the ground. (Those navigators, by the way, will get $58 for each person they sign up, on top of their hourly pay.) The big question: Is Obamacare going to work? Will it deliver better health to Americans? There are a lot of skeptics, including Forbes’ Paul Howard. Howard’s concern is that Obamacare is using mid-20th century assumptions about health and insurance in a 21st century world.

Washington’s view of health care remains deeply entrenched in mid-century assumptions about health and illness. Health care via industrial policy makes sense if illness is an Act of God to which all are equally vulnerable and a known quantity of health care can be delivered to everyone at a fixed price. If these assumptions are true, the largest payer – the government – can set the rules of the road, from which all (or almost all) benefit.

That was a reasonable picture of medicine well into the 20th century…when infectious diseases dominated U.S. deaths. But by 1950, heart disease and cancer had displaced infections as the nation’s most potent killers. (“Diseases of early infancy” was still the fourth-leading cause of death in 1950. By 2010, they had dropped off the table entirely.)

Referring to the Affordable Care Act, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Max Baucus (D-Mont.) stated earlier this year, “Unless we implement this properly, it’s going to be a train wreck.”

And indeed, from looking at the Obamacare implementation timeline alone, the law seems to have gotten off to a shaky start. The implementation of the so-called employer mandate, which would require businesses with more than 50 workers to offer insurance to all full-time employees, or else pay a fine of $2,000 per worker, has been delayed until after the 2014 midterm elections. And in late June, the Obama Administration announced another delay when it pushed back the August 1, 2013 deadline of requiring religiously-affiliated non-profits to comply with the mandate to provide coverage of contraceptives, to the beginning of next year.

Time can prove valuable and as the impending “train wreck” of Obamacare gathers momentum, more and more good, free-market alternatives are beginning to take shape.

One such approach will soon be discussed in the Michigan Senate. Last week, the Senate Government Operations committee voted to send two pieces of legislation, which would create a free-market alternative to Medicaid expansion, to the full Senate for consideration by the Chamber. “Senate Bills (SB) 459 and 460, introduced by Sen. Patrick Colbeck (R-Canton) and known as the Patient-Centered Care Act, would enact a patient-centered healthcare plan that expands access to quality care without expanding government,” according to a statement released last month. (more…)

… Fr Sirico highlighted his objectives in writing this book. Defending the Free Market, he said, was written “with the intention of making accessible economic ideas that I thought were important in general terms; but, in particular, especially for religious people, to understand there is what we call a normative or moral dimension to economic activity.”

“It’s not just, live by the Ten Commandments and open a store,” Fr Sirico explained, but he wanted to demonstrate “that there’s something more internal to the whole dynamism of a market economy that makes sense both economically and morally.”

Click on the media player below to listen to Schneible’s full interview with Rev. Sirico:

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In addition to internal logical inconsistencies which raise serious concerns of long term economic sustainability regarding the Affordable Care Act (ACA), recently analyzed by John MacDhubhain, Robert Pear reports in the New York Times over the weekend how confusion over certain ambiguities in the law (ironically over the meaning of the word “affordable”) would end up hurting some of the people it is precisely designed to help: working class families.

Pear writes,

The new health care law is known as the Affordable Care Act. But Democrats in Congress and advocates for low-income people say coverage may be unaffordable for millions of Americans because of a cramped reading of the law by the administration and by the Internal Revenue Service in particular.

Under rules proposed by the service, some working-class families would be unable to afford family coverage offered by their employers, and yet they would not qualify for subsidies provided by the law.

The Catholic Church has perhaps the most extensive private health-care delivery system in the nation. It operates 12.6 percent of hospitals in the U.S., according to the Catholic Health Association of the U.S., accounting for 15.6 percent of all admissions and 14.5 percent of all hospital expenses, a total for Catholic hospitals in 2010 of $98.6 billion. Whom do these hospitals serve? Catholic hospitals handle more than their share of Medicare (16.6 percent) and Medicaid (13.65) discharges, meaning that more than one in six seniors and disabled patients get attention from these hospitals, and more than one in every eight low-income patients as well. Almost a third (32 percent) of these hospitals are located in rural areas, where patients usually have few other options for care.

The poor and working class families that get assistance from Catholic benefactors would end up having to pay more for their care than they do under the current system. Rural patients would have to travel farther for medical care, and services like social work and breast-cancer screenings would fall to the less-efficient government-run institutions. That would not only impact the poor and working class patients, but would create much longer wait times for everyone else in the system. Finally, over a half-million people employed by Catholic hospitals now would lose their jobs almost overnight, which would have a big impact on the economy as well as on health care.